Blonde."
Every one knows the tune. Then we sang "The Song of the Miller," and
then many other songs, each longer than the last. For these songs, like
other lyrics, have it for an object to string out as many verses as
possible in order to kill the endless straight roads and the weariness.

We had need to sing. No sun rose, but the day broke over an ugly plain
with hardly any trees, and that grey and wretched dawn came in with a
cold and dispiriting rain unrefreshed by wind. Colson, who was a foolish
little man (the son of a squire), marching by my side, wondered where
and how we should be dried that day. The army was for ever producing
problems for Colson, and I was often his comforter. He liked to talk to
me and hear about England, and the rich people and their security, and
how they never served as soldiers (from luxury), and how (what he could
not understand) the poor had a bargain struck with them by the rich
whereby they also need not serve. I could learn from him the meaning of
many French words which I did not yet know. He had some little
education; had I asked the more ignorant men of my battery, they would
only have laughed, but he had read, in common books, of the differences
between nations, and could explain many things to me.

Colson, then, complaining of the rain, and wondering where he should get
dried, I told him to consider not so much the happy English, but rather
his poor scabbard and how he should clean it after the march, and his
poor clothes, all coated with mud, and needing an hour's brushing, and
his poor temper, which, if he did not take great care, would make him
grow up to be an anti-militarist and a byword.

So we wrangled, and it still rained. Our songs grew rarer, and there was
at last no noise but the slush of all those feet beating the muddy road,
and the occasional clank of metal as a scabbard touched some other
steel, or a slung carbine struck the hilt of a bayonet. It was well on
in the morning when the guns caught us up and passed us; the drivers all
shrouded in their coats and bending forward in the rain; the guns coated
and splashed with thick mud, and the horses also threatened hours of
grooming. I looked mine up and down as Labbe passed on them, and I
groaned, for it is a rule that a man grooms his own horses whether he
has ridden them or no, and after all, day in and day out, it works fair.
The guns disappeared into the mist of rain, and we went on through more
hours of miserab